Into All the World

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. MARK 16:15

The seed of Amanda Smith’s missionary life was sown in a tent at the Sing Sing camp meeting, where a missionary’s wife spoke about the women of India and set out on a table the images of their gods. Amanda had never heard a missionary address in her life. She wept, and thought that if she could only go and sing I am so glad that Jesus loves me, they would all be converted right off. “But O, how little I knew,” she added long afterwards, “about heathen superstitious and customs.” She gave her last two dollars, went up to the speaker sobbing, and asked, “Can I go to India?” Nine years later she did.

India

She landed at Bombay in November 1879 and worked in India, with a visit to Burma, for the better part of two years. She travelled from mission to mission, speaking in churches, schools, orphanages, open squares and once in a Calcutta theatre. James Thoburn, then a missionary pastor in Calcutta and later a bishop, wrote in his introduction to her Autobiography that in seventeen years he had never known anyone who could draw and hold so large an audience in that city as she did.

He told one story that says a great deal. They were holding an open-air meeting in a Calcutta square at a tense time, when a mob that had just broken up another missionary’s meeting came rushing toward them with threatening cries. Thoburn would have climbed onto the box to command the crowd. Amanda knelt on the grass and began to pray, her face lifted to the evening sky, and the crowd, he says, became perfectly still, and they had as orderly a meeting as if they had been inside a church.

And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. ACTS 4:31

Africa

In January 1882 she landed at Monrovia, and for about eight years she worked in Liberia and along the West African coast, from Sierra Leone to Old Calabar. She had no mission board behind her; she worked alongside Methodist, Episcopal, Baptist and Presbyterian churches, and for part of the time with William Taylor, the Methodist missionary bishop for Africa, whose self-sacrifice she deeply admired. She held revival meetings, Bible readings and temperance meetings; she visited the sick and the dying; she organised praying bands. She suffered repeatedly from African fever and more than once thought she would die. She took African children into her care and paid for them from what she was given.

Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. REVELATION 2:10

Her reflections on the work are often acute. She saw that many mission schools declined when the founding missionaries died or went home, and asked why. She protested that no church or society ever paid a coloured missionary, however efficient, as much as it paid a white one, however inexperienced, and expected more work of him besides; she believed this had hastened the death of the finest Black missionary she ever knew. She criticised Liberian traders who went up country and abandoned their families. She warned that many of the emigrants sent out from America were ill-prepared, sick and destitute, and argued, against much opinion, that the colonisation scheme should be wound up and Black Americans assured that there was a place for them in the United States. She was not a romantic about Africa or about Liberia. She saw its failures and said so, and told the Liberians that speaking of them was not a betrayal.

For there is no respect of persons with God. ROMANS 2:11

Where she must be read with care

Here the reader must be honest. Amanda Smith saw India and Africa as a nineteenth-century missionary, and she wrote about them in the language of her time. She speaks of heathen darkness, of idols and superstition, of the need to civilise and Christianise. She describes customs she found in the royal yards of Old Calabar — chiefs with many wives, girls married at fourteen, newborn twins abandoned to die, trial by poison for witchcraft — with horror, and sometimes without much attempt to understand the societies in which they occurred. She could write of Indians bound by caste, or of Africans in the interior, in terms that now sound condescending, and she generally assumed that the culture of the Christian West was the standard toward which others should rise.

It would be easy, and cheap, to sneer at this from a later century. She was a poor Black woman who had been born enslaved, working without pay among peoples she had never seen, and many of the things she opposed — the abandonment of twins, the sale of girls, the poison ordeal, the deadly liquor trade — were cruel by any measure, and were opposed by many Africans too. She also treated the Africans she lived with as brothers and sisters: she wept over their sufferings, took their children as her own, honoured African preachers and native Christian women, and did not spare white missionaries, foreign merchants or mission boards. But charity to her does not require agreement with all her judgements. The gospel is not Western civilisation, and a Christian reading her today should separate the one from the other more carefully than she always did.

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? 1 CORINTHIANS 3:5

Faith for the world

What she teaches most deeply about missions is not a strategy but a spirit. Thoburn noticed it first: she was always cheerful and hopeful. Others looked at the strongholds of the old religions and despaired. She believed that the Saviour she loved really meant to save and transform India and Africa, and she worked on that assumption with whatever she had. And she did it without a salary, a board or a guaranteed passage home, trusting the God who had sent her to keep her.

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. REVELATION 11:15

It is worth adding that the churches of India and West Africa are now among the most vigorous in the world. She would not have been surprised.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. She gave her last two dollars at a missionary meeting and asked, Can I go? Ask God what your part in the gospel reaching the nations is, and do one concrete thing about it this month.

2. Read about the church in one country she worked in — India, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Nigeria — as it is today, and pray for it by name.

3. Examine your own assumptions: where do you confuse the gospel with your own culture? Ask a believer from another culture to help you see it.

4. Think of those who serve cross-culturally and are underpaid or overlooked. Find one, and support them this week.

5. Practise her hope: name a place or a person you have privately written off, and begin to pray for them as if Christ really meant to save them.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, You sent a washerwoman to India and Africa, and You are still sending whom You will.

Give me her hope, that will not despair of any people or any place, and her willingness to give the last two dollars.

Forgive the church for every time it has confused Your gospel with its own culture, or paid Your servants by the colour of their skin.

Let Your kingdom come among every nation, kindred, people and tongue, and let me have some part in it. Amen.